Mobile communication devices such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) are becoming increasingly popular in light of their increasing ease of use as well as the increasing availability of wireless access to the Internet. These devices are often used to access information from the Internet at locations away from a user's home or office and may be used for on-line purchases. The recent development of on-line networks has led to on-line advertising. For example, on the Internet, advertisements often appear on a Web page as a banner on the top or bottom of the page. When the user views a Web page using a browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape, the banner appears at the appropriate location on the computer screen. The Web page may include a number of banners which are to be displayed on the user's terminal in conjunction with the Web page. Typically, the banners are each stored as a separate file on a server and have their own URL (Uniform Resource Locator) address. When the Web page is initially transmitted from the server to the user's terminal, the browser receives the URL addresses for the banners and then requests that they be transmitted from the server on which they are stored to the user's terminal for display in conjunction with the Web page. The server on which the banners are stored may or may not be the same server on which the original Web page is stored.
Currently, many Web portals such as Yahoo and Netzero generate substantial revenue from banner advertisements or ad bars included in their delivered content. New methods of dynamic advertising based on the contents or characteristics of the user's own device allow advertisers to target their advertisement. Examples of dynamic advertising are described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/430,263, entitled “Active Marketing Based on Client Computer Configurations”, filed on Oct. 29, 1999, and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/704,061, entitled “Method and System for Utilizing Wireless Protocol Information for Marketing Opportunities”, filed Oct. 30, 2000, which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. The disclosed methods utilize a marketing opportunity detection application that is used to analyze the configuration of the client computer and generate a list of marketing opportunities.
One predominant and intrinsically necessary feature of handheld computers is their small viewing screens. With the rapid deployment of Web sites for wireless handheld devices, it is vital for such providers to continue pushing ads to users, even if those users have the small screens associated with the handheld computers. However, because of the smaller screen size and slower connection bandwidth, it is typically unacceptable to the user to let an ad banner occupy a substantial portion of the limited screen.
Web based interactive devices, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,018,710, provide a non-visual browsing environment for the World Wide Web. HTML documents are converted into an audio output and visual Web pages are replaced with audio output. One drawback to these audio systems is that the user is not able to view graphic images available on the Web sites.
There is, therefore, a need for a method and system for providing advertising messages to users of handheld computers which do not interfere with the viewing of visual content on the small screen of the handheld computer.